Tuesday, April 14, 2009

"Mes Voeux (my wishes) is a series comprising individually framed photos and in some version fragments of text which refer to the images pinned by strings to the gallery wall. The images are an array of female and male body parts of people of various ages. Each example of the work can be taken in as a unified field but as the viewer's eye moves in the whole ensemble dissolves into a shifting pattern of associations. Messager fragments the body into named parts-- eyes, ears, geitals, mouths, hands, and so on-- so that the images become a visual equivalent of nouns. The movement of the eye around the work becomes an involuntary listing that accumulates but can never retain the entirety."

Sunday, April 12, 2009

"Kosuth had the idea of juxtaposing textual description with its physical reference in 1965. In box cube empty clear glass (pictured below) each of the four words of the cubes propped side by side against the wall reading the words and looking at the glass occur at the same time and produce the same meaning. the relationship between photography and written language as alternative forms of reference is the subject of the tripartite, retrospectively titled Proto-Investigations conceived in the same year to which One and Three Chairs belongs(pictured above). These present three versions of a utilitarian object- The physical object, a life size photograph of it and an enlarged facsimile of its dictionary definition- placed alongside each other. The object in this case a chair is flanked by the two representation emphasizing the conceptual relationships and disparities between it. it's definition and its visual image."